Looking at the leader board rosters sure us confusing.

[Konman]

I was curiouis about the characters and covers of the point leaders in my Thick as Thieves bracket. The leader, with over 33,000 points doesn't have a character over level 70 (the highest is a level 69 classic Strorm). So the team he would put together for this event would seem to be pretty mediocre, and yet this person is killing. There is no way these levels and characters coud win versus the levels of mobs I have to fight.

So how do they do it?

[pasa]

on d3 this is a frequent question these days. Devs asked to report suspicious activity in support ticket.

The event is fooked with the leveling so it;s hard to tell what's possible when some fight 16lvl mobs others 133 and yet others se onlt 230. And deleveling is possible subject to patience.

[HavocGr]

I just saw the top leaders there, triple my score, highest hero they have is lvl 40!! Cheating for SURE.

[Jeffro]

There's a lot of cheating going on in this game. Or some folks have spent $1000s on card pulls.

This should be auto-deleted, but devs are focused on ruining the game for poor players.

[[3GB] Ricardo]

well i think that is just luck,cause im #2 in the leaderboards and im only playing with my storm modern (lvl 50), black widow classic (lvl 20) and wolverine patch (lvl 20) and i dont cheat anything and i dont spent a cent in this

[bigdgaff]

When I started playing back in November 2013, I just entered a PVP tournament to see how it would go on my 3rd day. I had approximately a lvl 10 IM35, lvl 7 MBW and lvl 10 Wolvie. I placed 7th and won a yellow Spidey cover.

I thought this was normal and was confused when I couldn't get above 500th place in the next event. It was only after going to the forums that I learned about the MMR system and that I had massively over achieved in that first event.

Those low level players scoring high points are most likely either players who have learned the benefits of tanking early on, or fairly new players with low MMR seeing low level enemies and will get hit hard by the MMR bat next event.

[SpectralShade]

you can't base anything on the event as far as calling cheaters.

The mobs are scaled dependent on your roster in >some< way. I've twice gotten high enough rank to receive 2 heroic covers (and would have gotten higher if I wasn't limited by the missions I could undertake by not having the required characters). My highest level character is 27 with the rest of my roster trailing that, but slowly getting up.

If you got all the characters the event needs, there's no real reason why you can't be #1 rank with a relatively low level team.

[MegaGame]

well the some of the heroes does get buff in the pve events, you just need them, they lvl is not that importen, it helps if they are lvled up with skills/abilitys.

[Its Pixie!]

my team of lvl 70 widow lvl 50 storm and37 bullseye beat a team of lvl 163

its all about field control

[pajakulebrc]

I got into top 100 on leaderboard ( as for now ) and my best hero is lvl 32 Iron Man model 35... other than that i have modern Widow lvl 30, Juggernaut lvl 25 and a bunch of two star characters leveled around 10-15...

Its all about proper team composition and board control... Some heroes are buffed for this event, so even a measly lvl 15 Spiderman - Bag Man can pack quite a punch

Just because someone has more skill than you, doesnt mean hes a cheater

[Oldie]

I can beat lvl 230 Venom-Moonstone-Ares-Bullseye-Juggernaut-Ragnarok-Yelena-whatever with lvl 40-50-ish Spider-Man, Wolverine**/Patch and oBW, admittedly all of them are boosted in Thick as Thieves. But I don't have the passion to grind missions where all of my heroes can get killed (need some luck still and Maggia is surprisingly harder than actual matchmaking enemies) for 20 iso.

[Turbine]

i consistently finish high in the tournaments in fact ive been surprised at just how easy it is, my highest level hero is iron man i think he has 1950 health and is level 33, my next highest is level 23 - spiderman bagman

sometimes, and by sometimes i mean often, there are heros you can choose whos abilitys have been powered up, regularly i am offered the chance to used a beefed up version of patchwork wolverine, and although he is only level 18 for me and has something like 852 hp, when powered up this soars to around 4500hp so i have been able to very easily defeat 3x enemy of level 45 with my level 33, level 23 and level 18 characters on the same team

with regards to tournaments, rounds can be repeated to a degree, each time you repeat the round you win less points until after a few times you can win a maximum of 1 point on completion of the round

i forget the name of the tournament, but yesterday i finished overall ranked 7 in the tournament, now i know that i had repeated all the rounds fully to the extent that i could only possibly win 1 point for every single round in the event, should i wish to repeat it again. that being said, the players who finished above me had up to 10000 more points then me which i find VERY suspicious because id have to complete over 10000 more rounds in order to gain that many points, because i had, in my opinion, maxed out my points by completing every round until they were worth only 1 point

so the point is, yes it is very easy to finish high in the events, but even if you do, the guys ahead of you will be so far ahead of you that they are literally impossible to catch so even if you do finish high, it still looks very suspicious.....not least because its always the same guys who beat me

also, ive checked their player rosters, where i have a mere 6 characters these guys in some cases have 30+ characters which leads me to believe that they have pumped huge sums of money into the game a la "pay to win" or, they are in fact cheating in some way

none the less, given that i have not paid a single penny into this game and consistently finish high in tournaments....i am very happy with my achievements in this game although i dont like the prospect that in order to actually win a tournament, you either have to pay or cheat

[pasa]

Turbine:
1. You can have a 30-ish roster without paying a cent. (mine is 28/28 with spare HP for 2 more slots). Certainly there are people who spent some ot much money.

2. In PvE the repeatable missions reset 8 hours after completion. So can be harvested 3, sometimes 4 times for X repeats (in the last tournaments X was 2). Points start small with early subs but around the last they are 1000-ish. So you can gather 5k point difference in one round easily. Also I doubt you completed the all 230lvl missions with your roster both for it's too weak and you lack the required covers. So it's perfectly normal to have others with 10k plus points.

To win a tournament you indeed have to spend at least on shields so must gather HP some way and it is scarce. But winning is not for everyone outright, and you can get to fair places without paying a dime. AAMOF the system is pretty broken currently and as rosters can be seen I read a plenty of complaints of medium level players that your kind of roster is above them in the bracket and how it is possible; they are only offered matches with 3x100+ rares and can't fight leaders in their brackets.

[Hex: Realm Offering]

About the thick as theives thing...

Wolverine, Classic Black Widow, spiderman, and...uh...someone else...yeah, they're buffed in that event.

My classic black widow is level 8, and in that event, She could MURDER my level 26 Iron Man based on the stats alone.

My Bag-man Spiderman and Classic Wolverine have recently hit level 30 and have been able to murder everything except the Magneto and The Hood level (though I haven't tried yet cause SCREW YOU NECCESARY UNBUFFED LOW LEVEL STORM).

Also, while all of those are really buffed, Patch wolverine is INSANELY powerful. It's completely possible to win with him alone in some levels (I've won a level with a teamup with him and my level 10 Venom and 15 Thor against levels 15 levels higher than Wolverine).

Simply put, it's not just levels, it's stats, and chances are, the high place players are using those characters.

[[TIGS] starsrift]

The Thick as Thieves event attempts to gauge your strength and pitch enemies at you at your level, or a little higher or lower (depending on the exact mission), and adapts by leveling up the enemies as you win. Furthermore, new sub-events would initialize their values based upon your current success in the main event. Old PvE events changed bracket-wide, this one (and presumably the next ones going forward) are individual.
This also means you could game the system by losing matches (typically with unleveled characters), though now the event is nearly over, it's already accumulated enough data to hardly change.

These things taken all together, this means that roster of a player is meaningless in the PvE event.

[Venerable Kroak]

I was playing exactly 7 days to this so I am not experienced [and not a native english writer], and versus a boss fight lvl230 I didn't even try, but as far I can tell you can win with some crap team like a 1Star 40lvl Hawkeye, 35lvl BW & 35 Juggernaut to 110lvl mobs, you need some luck at first movements. Deadly for sure but, just for fun, I waited 4minutes to revive them, entering with 13health points and without any boost I finished, all alive, with 178 health like half an hour later.

I'm just saying its hard to know or tell how the others have achieved their points, and eventually matches reset as someone told before, from 1 to 300-100 and dropping to 1 again.